Monday, 27 January 2014

"All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.

(...)

but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

(...)

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

(...)

Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

(...)

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

This is an opportunity for those who read the blog (or are just stumbling through at the moment) to choose what I'll read in 2014. I decided to ask you all which should be the first book of each of the following groups I'll read this year. I'll try to review here all of the books chosen by you. So vote away, in one to three books in each section.

Saturday, 18 January 2014

I've never seen a diamond in the fleshI cut my teeth on wedding rings in the moviesAnd I'm not proud of my addressIn the torn up town, no post code envy

But every song's like:Gold teethGrey GooseTripping in the bathroomBloodstainsBall gownsTrashing the hotel room

We don't care, we're driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody's like:CrystalMaybachDiamonds on your timepieceJet planesIslandsTigers on a gold leash

We don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair

And we'll never be royals (royals)It don't run in our bloodThat kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzzLet me be your ruler (ruler)You can call me queen beeAnd baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll ruleLet me live that fantasy

My friends and I we've cracked the codeWe count our dollars on the train to the partyAnd everyone who knows us knowsThat we're fine with this, we didn't come from money

But every song's like:Gold teethGrey GooseTripping in the bathroomBloodstainsBall gownsTrashing the hotel room

We don't care, we're driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody's like:CrystalMaybachDiamonds on your timepieceJet planesIslandsTigers on a gold leash

We don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair

And we'll never be royals (royals)It don't run in our bloodThat kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzzLet me be your ruler (ruler)You can call me queen beeAnd baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll ruleLet me live that fantasy

ooh ooh oh oohWe're better than we've every dreamedAnd I'm in love with being queen

ooh ooh oh oohLife is great without a careWe aren't caught up in your love affair

And we'll never be royals (royals)It don't run in our bloodThat kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzzLet me be your ruler (ruler)You can call me queen beeAnd baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll ruleLet me live that fantasy